Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD
Focus, starting, and ADHD
Most advice about focus is written for a brain that starts easily. This area is not. It covers what ADHD actually is, how to make a start when starting is the hard part, how to bring a future consequence close enough to feel, and how to stop paying for it in shame.
What works for this
Implementation intentions
Putting things off is mood repair rather than laziness: delay removes the bad feeling straight away and the cost lands later. So the move is not more willpower, it is a plan specific enough to run without a decision.
One move, today
Write one sentence: when it is [time] and I am at [place], I will [the first small action]. Naming when and where is the part the evidence supports.
What matches
5 practicesIf rating a feeling out of ten means nothing to you, use something that does. Colour in bubbles, point at a picture, hold your hands apart to show how big it is today.
This began as an adaptation for children, swapping the numbered anxiety ladder for bubbles to colour in, and it is just as useful for anyone who goes…
When someone has gone flat, the question is not what they ought to be doing. It is what still has any life in it for them, however small or unimpressive, and then how to get more of that.
Activities handed out from the outside do not lift much. Someone who brightens talking about their car, or a cousin, or a game has just given you the…
A young person on the sofa with their phone looks like nothing is happening. From the inside it is often the first hour all day that has asked nothing of them.
Both readings are true, and the argument is usually about which one gets said out loud. Naming the second one to a parent takes a surprising amount…
Nobody gets far taking the drink away without asking what the drinking was for. It is the same here. Find out what the scrolling is doing for someone before you start subtracting hours.
It is doing something, or it would not have lasted this long. Company at one in the morning. A way to stop thinking. Somewhere they are good at…
An alarm that marks the end of a session rather than the start. A written list of what these apps give you and what they cost. The phone's own usage figures. An agreement that an hour of scrolling gets matched with an hour of something else. Pick whichever you would actually do.
The choosing is part of why any of it works. A limit handed down gets tested and beaten, while one somebody picked themselves tends to survive a bad…